French President Emmanuel Macron, whose popularity ratings (at around 18 percent) are well below Trump’s, exited Paris yesterday for the Middle East, even as some neighborhoods of major French cities were still smoking. Supposedly, he is on a mission to bring down fuel prices. Bonne chance to that.
The French mess is best understood in three dimensions that are all connected—the social, the economic, and the political. Socially, the protests, which caught the government by surprise in their ferocity, are mainly symptoms. The most severe riots since the famous events of 1968 began with high school students, who are ostensibly fed up with tattered schools and inadequate materials. But what they are really despairing about is the absence of life chances and hope.
Much of this protest is centered in the French banlieues—the suburbs. In France, where the social meaning of suburb is the opposite of America’s, the banlieues are where the government stashed immigrants and the local poor in massive housing projects that are bleak social failures, while the affluent live in chic city arrondissements.
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This social failure is hardly a secret. Several recent hit French films are about seemingly unteachable insolent students and idealistic but quickly burnt-out teachers, beginning with the 2008 classic Entre Les Murs. In the popular TV series, Marseille, starring the great warhorse actor Gérard Depardieu as the mayor, kids in the housing projects do violent errands for the local Mafia.
And it isn’t just students who are disaffected. Just about everyone is pissed at one grievance or another. That’s why the protests spread. The French riots are reminiscent of the old Irish joke in which a man in a pub observes a brawl break out and inquires, “Is this a private fight or can anyone get into it?”
France’s welfare state has reached it limits to compensate for an economy that works only for the rich.
The second, and related, dimension is economic. The French economic model is failing the citizenry, and its failure is a variation of what is occurring throughout the West.
The turn to global neoliberalism since the 1980s has not increased economic performance, but widened inequality. The lackluster growth has put increased pressure on the French welfare state, which is relatively generous. But the welfare state has reached its limits to compensate for an economy that works only for the rich.
As French deficits and debts have increased, the global bond market has raised government borrowing costs, exacerbating the fiscal stress. Interestingly, it is considered a crisis that the French ten-year government bond just hit an interest rate of 5 percent. In the U.S., the ten-year bond sailed past 5 percent weeks ago. But France, as a medium-sized economy, is more dependent on the bond market than the U.S. is.
Macron, the ultimate in technocratic leaders, has tried to trim costs, most recently with a 43 billion euro cut in public spending in his proposed 2026-2027 budget, which includes an increase in the retirement age and cuts in health and other social spending. But these proposed cuts, which are unlikely to be enacted, have only made him more detested.
Politically, these multiple crises, punctuated by protests that in places turned violent, demonstrated the collapse of the political center, and energized the far left and especially the far right. With presidential elections set for April 2027, in two rounds, Marine Le Pen of the Rassemblement National (National Rally) is the front-runner. On the far left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon of La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) cheered on the protests.
Polls show Mélenchon running second, well behind Le Pen. If the final round is Le Pen versus Mélenchon, Le Pen almost certainly wins and by a wide margin. Other candidates on the moderate left and moderate right splinter the rest of the vote.
One outside chance of denying the presidency to Le Pen would be if Raphaël Glucksmann, the nominee of the Socialist Party, continues to gain ground and edges out Mélenchon to face Le Pen in the final round. The latest polls show Le Pen at 36 percent, Mélenchon with 16.5 percent, and Glucksmann 13.5 percent. On the center-right, former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe draws about the same share as Glucksmann.
While the far-left Mélenchon could not defeat Le Pen in the final, Glucksmann or Philippe might well do it. But for that to happen, one would have to withdraw and throw their support to the other—a most un-French sacrifice for the greater good.
The French gains for the far left and the far right are a variant of what is occurring all over Europe, as the center has utterly failed to deliver prosperity and opportunity to ordinary working people and cultural issues have backfired on the socially tolerant moderate left.
In The New York Times, the estimable Steven Erlanger has a smart explainer piece on this dynamic. Complementing his own excellent analysis, Erlanger quotes the Nobel laureate MIT economist Daron Acemoglu pointing out that the traditional moderate left got sidetracked with elite cultural issues and ignored its working-class base. “The centerpiece has to be creating jobs and wage growth and career paths for people without college degrees and diverse skills,” Acemoglu told Erlanger in an interview.
As we used to say in my grade school, No shit, Dick Tracy. I can’t resist adding that when writers in The American Prospect, or our friends at the Economic Policy Institute, keep pointing this out (over decades), it’s not a story. When a prominent mainstream economist finally figures it out, it’s worth a Nobel.
